
Member Reviews

Not a fav.
Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

Sloane Crosley's latest work is a meditation on loss and grief. First, her apartment is robbed while she is out for an hour, and many heirlooms are stolen. Not long afterward, her best friend kills himself.
But these are mainly the stories upon which deeper meaning is sought. Sloane pursues locating her stolen jewelry like a detective, even using the services of detectives. She peruses the months before her friend's suicide, dissecting his behavioural changes and trying to remember instances that might have clued her to his sadness.
There is much soul searching, and frustration at never being able to come up with an answer besides allowing grief to be, to morph in the ways it does, taking as much time as it does.

There are books whose titles are drawn from the text; you don't know when you'll encounter it until you get there and then tears spring to your eyes when you do. This is one (No One is Talking about This by Patricia Lockwood is another).
This book is not a fast read, although it's short, nor is it an easy read. Some of the sentences felt they should have been read aloud first, as a test of their readability, but you can understand why they weren't. It really must have been hard to write this. You can tell she really loved him.
My gratitude to NetGalley for allowing me access to an electronic ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. The author has always written such funny essays and novels, but is now hit with her New York City apartment being robbed and one of her best friends committing suicide, exactly one month apart. While her humor never leaves her, there are just some things that can’t be laughed away. She goes through the stages of grief and recalls fun tales of working for publicity for Vintage Books, where she and her friend used to work, as she plots to track down the jewelry that was stolen during the break in and then even has a world wide pandemic come to strand her in her apartment with her grief. She looks for her dead friend everywhere, as far away as Australia, and never finds him, but still learns to live with him.